Dragon Ball GT Lost Episodes Vol. #3: Ruination Uncut

What They SayEpisode 7: Trunks, the Bride The Saiyans arrive on a peaceful planet with one very large problem. The monster Zoonama has the incredible ability to produce earthquakes by merely shaking his gigantic whiskers! Now the monster is demanding a bride. If the villagers don't comply their very survival cannot be guaranteed!

Episode 8: Whisker Power Not bowing to the demands of the wicked Zoonama, Trunks reluctantly poses as Zoonama's "bride" in an attempt to sneak deep into the monster's lair under a volcano and free the people of the village forever. But things get hot as Zoonama reveals a secret and the volcano prepares to blow!

Episode 9: Lord Luud After seemingly securing a dragon ball, three mysterious strangers steal what the Saiyans worked so hard to attain. In their haste to track down the thieves, Goku, Pan, and Trunks find themselves tricked into touching down on a dangerous asteroid. Meanwhile the three strangers present the spoils to their bizarre leader! Just who is this mystery man... and what makes him so dangerous?

The Review!As the journey continues, the show goes into cross-dressing gags before introducing the next big set of villains.

Audio: For our primary viewing session, we listened to this show in its original language of Japanese. Though listed as stereo, the series has a heavy mono feel with the bulk of all the sounds coming through the center channel. Dialogue is clean and clear throughout it but there's little dynamic to it or even the music. We had no problems with dropouts or distortions during regular playback of either track.

Video: Originally airing in 1996 and 1997, the transfer here comes across well but suffers from seemingly poor source materials considering the recent age of the series. The bulk of the problem comes in the form of the sheer amount of grain, with some episodes heavier on it than others. This causes a number of areas to look less than stable, from anything showing blue skies to the fiery sequences that look like they're macroblocking more than they should. Other issues are pretty minimal to non-existent however, such as cross coloration and aliasing.

Packaging: Using the same style as the non-lost episodes of the series, the top quarter of the cover is made up of a solid backdrop for just the large logo with the volume title below it. The character shots used this time around has a full color piece of Pan while Goku is behind her with a blue colored filter. Much like the other volumes, I really don't like the layout of these at all since there's so much waste real estate and half the time the character artwork looks too cartoonish. The back cover provides a few shots from these episodes as well as an English-dub based summary of the show. The overall layout of the back cover looks somewhat cleaned up over the prior releases with information easier to find. As seems to be the norm for this series, there is no insert included and I don't much mind the lack of one. Like most other FUNimation discs, I continue to take issue with how they calculate run times. The box for this one lists it as 62 minutes. Yet when the DVD player counts it up, it's listing 75 minutes (or 68 if you watch the English language version).

Menu: Using the same elements as the cover but rearranged with the menu selections in the middle, the static menu has some of the US music playing along to it. With little on the disc and no transitional animations, submenus are quick to load and the layout works well, though I dislike the way episodes are broken down without an actual eye-catch chapter mark.

Extras: The extras are pretty typical of the series with a brief section of character profiles and the standard textless songs section. Another piece added to this one that's showing up on various Dragon Ball related shows recently is the Top Ten Fighting Scenes from all the Dragon Ball franchises. This looks to be the same as the one we saw elsewhere so your enjoyment of it may be reflected by how often you see it.

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)As the Lost Episodes segment continues, the journey across various planets and cultures is the order of the day for Pan, Goku and Trunks as they search for the Dragon Balls. Having acquired their first one and getting through some amusing adventures for it, they're back on the path for the second one and have more similarly themed things to deal with.

The first part of the disc has a two-part story that brings the group to a new planet where they're tracking down the second Ball. To their luck, they find it rather easily in a village where a young woman has attached it to the bottom of her hair braid. But the group there isn't wanting to talk about that at the moment as the young woman, Leine, has been chosen to be the sacrificial bride for Zumana. Zumana, as it turns out, is a big and fairly ugly looking beast of a creature that's been threatening the village lately for all sorts of goods and food but has decided that he now wants a bride.

Being big and ugly doesn't always give someone the backing they need to threaten an entire village but Zumana also apparently has the ability to wiggle his whiskers and create earthquakes. He's even threatened to have the nearby volcano erupt if he doesn't get what he wants. So now that he wants a bride, the entire ordeal has become more personal for the town and our favorite group of heroes just happened to walk right into the middle of it. Naturally, they're not liking what they're hearing but they also see an opportunity to get the Dragon Ball from them and do a good deed at the same time. So an elaborate plan ensues.

Instead of a simple "three powerful people go beat up ugly bad villain". The entire two-part adventure could have lasted all of ten minutes this way. But that's why I'm not a script writer.

While there are some amusing gags, particularly when Trunks is forced into the bride role, the two-parter really serves as a setup for the next arc which brings in the "para" race, a strange group that's also searching out the Dragon Balls for someone who wants them. Swiping their second Dragon Ball, the para's head off into space to take it home while our trio of heroes follows them, only to be lost inside a massive maze-like asteroid. There is a lot of minor set up done here to bring this new group of villains into play as we get to see their secret lair and references to the one they're serving, but not enough to really sink your teeth into whatever they're bringing to the table.

In Summary: Dragon Ball GT hasn't really changed much in how things go since they moved out into space to start the missions so this volume really doesn't come with any surprises. With the second ball being stolen from them already, I expect that their meeting of this new group will make it easier for them to get closer to the rest of the missing Dragon Balls since there really isn't all that much left in the arc before it goes to the regular GT episodes. This volume is cute and amusing, which is how most of the series can be viewed if you like it, and it's generally fun to watch Goku and the others do what they do. But as with past volumes, things just go on for longer than is necessary sometimes and it just drags in a lot of places.